posted
Peregrinus: Your remark and the previous one that persons of the 24th century (with few exceptions) have no problem using the transporter is clearly the only stance that will prevail.
But a few more annotations:
I can't really follow the arguments by Guardian. To me a multitude of atoms may be something special, while one atom is clearly not. One is exactly like the other. It doesn't have any distinguishing marks. You can't even see or notice it in any way. And most of all, it behaves Heisenberg-ishly. In this light, there must be a line or a scale where something becomes unique (may be "alive" and may ultimately have a "soul").
That's why I firmly believe that the transporter decomposes a human being down to a level where individuality is still preserved (with "Second Chances" and "Our Man Bashir" being hard to explain exceptions). I would even go as far as saying that the transporter "pattern" is alive.
This is clearly not the case with atoms or even energy. You could as well send atomic or energy patterns as bit sequences through a communication channel.
-------------------- Bernd Schneider
Registered: Mar 1999
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Quite. The "matter stream" referred to in the shows and the TNG TM is definitely animate matter. Rick also mentions that not even the processing power of the Enterprise-D's computers can map all the positions and all the motions of all the quanta of a transportee, so as a person is dematerialized, the stream is like one long thread, with each particle "remembering" the ones that were adjacent to it. For those who have seen TRON, the digitizing beam in the laser bay is a good visual aid.
I know we are still too limited to be able to define life, in the context of how organic molecules can go from being quasi-animate agglomerations of proteins that can make crude copies of themselves... to being an actual life-form, sentient or not, micro- or macroscopic.
I know the electron cloud is responsible for a lot of the properties of matter -- such as the transparancy of the solid made from silicon and oxygen, or the glitter of gold. But how much that may affect "life", I don't know. It's a subject I periodically delve into, doing as much heavy thinking as I can before my nose starts to bleed. If our consciousness is a constantly fading and renewing picture painted by electrical charges across synapses, that's one thing. But I'm curious at the moment to learn what prompts crude proteins to start copying themselves with available free amino acids...
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Krauss talks about this subject in "The Physics of Star Trek." He says:
quote:Perhaps the most fascinating question about beaming--one that is usually not even addressed--is, What comprises a human being? Are we merely the sum of all our atoms? More precisely, if I were to re-create each atom in your body, in precisely the same chemical state of excitation as your atoms are in this moment, would I produce a functionally identical person who has exactly your memories, hopes, dreams, and spirit? There is every reason to expect that this would be the case, but it is worth noting that it flies in the face of a great deal of spiritual belief about the existence of a "soul" that is somehow distinct from one's body.
I believe our self-awareness is evidence of a soul. Perhaps, during transport, our soul shuts down. When our bodies are reconstructed, and our heart is coaxed into beating again, they begin operating, creating our soul, much like a virtual machine.
What I mean to say is, the operation of our bodies: electrical synapses and such, cause our soul to exist. We temporarily shut down during transport, although this is contradicted by what we've seen of the Transporter on the screen. ("Realm of Fear," The Wrath of Khan)
-------------------- "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
posted
The problem is that Kraus is trying to explain things with real world physics as much as possible, which states that the cellular information is essentially copied, wheras the Trek tech explanation is pseudo-science, and states that the cells and particles are actually moved.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Exactly. Which is why I couldn't read the rest of the chapter on transporters, or take the rest of the book seriously if he misunderstood that basic a Treknological premise.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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Uh, the book uses Star Trek as a jumping off point to talk about actual science. Faulting it for not being a "nonfiction" fiction book ala the TNG technical manual is hardly fair.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Well, I've had the physics of Superman book for a while now, and the author of that one treats the subject seriously. He looks at what scenarios would have produced a world like Krypton, a race like the Kryptonians, and how the difference in suns/planets would allow for something like Superman to happen.
Then there are the Star Trek and Star Wars versions, that are very bad. The only redeeming part of the Star Wars book is the chapter on hyperspace. She spends the whole chapter on lightsabers trying to figure out how to get a laser beam to self-terminate a meter from the hilt. GNAAAARR!!! Repeat after me: Lightsabers are NOT optical phenomena. Yeesh.
The Star Trek one does exactly what you say. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for one that looks at what might possibly allow for what we see on the show, without falling back on our stone knives and bearskins. Ironically, I much prefer William Fucking Shatner's "I'm Working on That". THAT book treats the subject seriously.
If it's a treatise on contemporary science, then don't use a flawed understanding of Treknology as a springboard. That's just insulting...
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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Mountain Man
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posted
The Transporter and the Replicator both had their beginings in an episode of the outer limits.Scotty in fact was in that episode.Any thing could be reduced to a punch card.When energy was given the right pattern solid matter was the result.It worked on living things as well.A dog was killed, the dogs pattern had been stored in a small device by a little girl.When the dogs pattern was fed into the machine the dog was recreated as a living copy of itself,Identical to what it had been at the time the recording was made.In the TOS transporter solid matter was converted to energy.The Hiesenberg compensator made up for any lack of certainty about the measurement and recording of the data.The pattern buffer prevented degradation or corruption of the pattern.Containment fields reduced scattering due to outside influences.Any lost matter/energy was made up by boosting the signal.According to ancient Roman law no man was the same man after seven years because they believed that the body replaced its basic elements during that time.(don't know how they came to that conclusion)The soul is what made the man not the body.That part of man has yet to be defined much less measured.Doesn't give an answer but there it is folks.P.S. A version of the Hiesenberg compensator has been created to duplicate laser light sources by transmission of data around the world.There are machines used to make perfect 3D images using focused multible lasers to heat the surface of a pattern inside a container of liquid plastic.
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Mountain Man
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Hate to double post but the Light saber should be separate.The light saber is a contained laser beam.Conventional Lasers get their power from being reflected back and forth inside a solid transparent rod silvered at each end.One reflective surface is thinner and slightly more light permeable.When the light stream reaches the maximum power it penetrates the less reflective end,emerging as a coherent pulse of energetic photons.The light saber uses force fields instead of solid rods.The beam is contained until the beam touches the material to be cut.Its like the difference between an air chisel and a jigsaw.Similar in principle but different in application.
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It's not a laser. It casts a shadow, it blocks another lightsaber blade, it generally behaves like an object with mass, not a massless beam of energetic photons.
There was a wonderful web page that dealt with just this question, but it is currently down. Went through all the possibilities and ended up with the best guess based on observed properties.
That being: a lightsaber blade is a one-dimensional force field spinning at near lightspeed. The spin produces virtual photons that rapidly decay. This is why a lightsaber blade is very bright at the core, but the intensity falls off geometrically as you move out from the core, hence why a lightsaber doesn't illumnate a room or even nearby objects.
The spinning blade also disrupts the electron clouds of the matter it impacts, resulting in heat-like effects without being hot itself, hence cauterized wounds. Metals have more free electrons than non-metals, which is why the lightsaber doesn't have as pronounced an effect on armour or blast doors. Hence glancing off Vader's shoulder armour, and the time it took Qui-Gon to melt through the blast door.
An additional side effect of the rapidly spinning force field is an intense gyroscopic effect. A lightsaber won't want to move, and when you do get it to move, it won't necessarily want to move in the direction you want, or stop where you want it to. This is why the Jedi, with their Force-enhanced strength and dexterity, are about the only ones who can wield them with any skill (Han gutting a tauntaun with a single two-handed swipe doesn't count ).
This is all bleeding-edge theoretical physics coupled with basic Star Wars assumptions (compact power cell, force fields). I don't know where West End Games (the originators of the jewel-focussed blade model) pulled their lightsaber theory from, but it was probably the same place they got the eight-kilometer Super Star Destroyer. None of the original source material mentions gems, jewels, or crystals beyond Lucas' description of the jewel-decorated hilt in his Star Wars novelization -- but the rest of that description used the dropped first-draft saber design (one-handed hilt capped with a ten-centimeter-diameter polished disc) so I don't cling to stringently to it.
There is, however, no problem with using crystals to regulate the output from the power cell to the array of force field generators at the top of the hilt. The more crystals, the more precise you can make the blade. I imagine something to do with the number of crystals regulating pulses and the number and capacity of the field generators are what determine a lightsaber's colour.
And now back to your regularly-scheduled Trek...
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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The Real Physics At Work In Star Trek would be a very short and uninteresting book.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Mountain Man
Ex-Member
posted
When Star Wars first came out, the Light Saber was explained in the same way that I discribed.The actual effect was produced by Using an electric motor in the handle to spin a rod covered with reflective tape, a light being shone on the spinning rod.the rod was removed and replaced by a stage hand while the actor froze in position while the camera was cut off.The Discription that you have given appears to be a way to explain away the manner in which the prop saber reacts as a physical object rather than a beam of light as originaly planned.The compressed Photon beam might well react in the manner discribed It is still unclear how Photons mannage to move at the speed of light(being light)and still possess mass without breaking Ensteins rule . The intense magnetic field required to contain and reflect an energetic Photon stream would in itself effect whatever it touched like a physical object.My explaination is just the original one.I had not heard of any further attempts to give a scientfic reason for why the blade acts and reacts as a solid blade would.The magnetic fields of this kind are similar to those used to contain plasma in fusion reactors.That technology was not widely known at the time Star Wars came out.The light from the saber does not raditate from the side away from the lamp, and therefore it cast a shadow and does not illuminate anything behind it.The reflector tape is the same type as used on mail boxes and bicyles.One thing I like about that movie is how they got around lack of cash after blowing most of the special effects budget on the space battles.It's full of low cost but very effective stuff like the light saber.
[ September 01, 2003, 01:18 AM: Message edited by: Mountain Man ]
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